Addie Moore has been widowed for years. Her only son and his family live
out of town. She keeps fairly active but she’s lonely. So one day, out
of the blue, she calls a neighbor. Louis Waters, a retired high school
English teacher, lost his wife years ago. His only daughter lives out of
town as well.
Since Addie and Louis live in Holt, Colorado, the setting of all of Kent
Haruf’s unembellished novels, where people tend to create makeshift
families, they won’t be alone all the time in his final novel, Our Souls at Night.
The worst part of being alone, Addie tells Louis, is there is no one to
talk to at night. So what does he think about coming over to spend the
same night, to sleep in the same bed, no obligations, no sex? Well,
Louis thinks about it. And he heads over.
Their unorthodox relationship has some in town buzzing and others
cheering. But Addie says she’s way past worrying about others and it’s
time Louis did the same:
Over the course of a summer, they tell each other secrets and stories
from their lives, secure that neither will judge the other harshly or
wrongly. This includes a huge mistake Louis made and still regrets. He
also believes that mistake says something about his character.
It’s not something he wishes for his own daughter. He wishes the opposite for her:
"I wish you would find somebody who’s a self-starter. Somebody who would
go to Italy with you and get up on a Saturday morning and take you up
in the mountains and get snowed on and come home and be filled up with
it all."
When Addie’s young grandson is sent to spend the summer with her,
because his parents are fighting, Louis adds wonderful experiences to
the child’s world -- watching a nest of newborn mice, learning how to
play catch, going camping and having a dog.
Trouble could come from many sources -- their ages, their children, even
changing feelings. When trouble does arrive, it is infuriating, all the
more because it is entirely plausible. Family members don’t always wish
the best, and only the best, for each other. This seems especially true
when past hurts become deeply ingrained grudges. Some people just don’t
get over things. They let their hurts fester until their souls are
poisoned. And then, sometimes, they try to infect others with the same
venom. Even the people who love them.
Haruf gets this across calmly, quietly, letting the characters and their
actions speak for themselves without much exposition. This narrative
style may seem too quiet and nondescript for some. But when the
emotional wallops come, they are all the stronger for the lack of
hyperbole.
In this, his final novel, Haruf also has a grand meta moment when Addie
and Louis talk about dramatic adaptations of stories set in their town
by some writer. But they couldn’t be true. They’ve lived in Holt for
years and never heard about two old bachelor brothers who took in a
young pregnant woman.
For readers such as this one, who have adored Haruf’s novels since that story, Plainsong, it was a sweet moment of farewell.
©2015 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission
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